A Life and Death Matter? The Frustrating 'Non-Image' of California's $12 Billion Gene Therapy/Stem Cell Research Program

CIRM directors tackle its financial sustainability, first time since 2017

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Ca. -- California’s little-known, $12 billion effort to turn stem cells and genes into revolutionary therapies is suffering from a “non-image” problem.

The program operates in obscurity and is hardly a subject at any breakfast table in the Golden State. That is a natural condition for nearly all the other 234 California state departments, ranging from the Board of Accountancy to the Workforce Development Board.

But the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) is different. By law, CIRM lies under a slow-moving guillotine, one that no other state agency operates under. The more it spends, the faster it dies.

It survives solely on limited cash from state bonds, which were approved by state voters. Whether the agency lives or dies depends on how the state’s 23 million voters feel about CIRM in a few years when its funds start to run out.

CIRM will then face the prospect of returning to the voters for additional billions or finding alternative means to raise funds, or perish.

That’s why the agency’s “non-image” problem surfaced earlier this month during a meeting here of a key group of CIRM’s governing directors.

“I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to talk my colleagues at my own institution who go, what's CIRM?” said Judy Gasson, a CIRM director who is also senior advisor for research and innovation at the UCLA medical school.

“It's been 20 years, people.”